White House officials have said they have no plans to get behind gun-control legislation, citing the difficult politics of the subject.

***

Obama is no stranger to dipping deep into the murky waters of executive powers and finding ways to achieve policy goals that Congress has thwarted. Proponents of gun control say that the president has crystal clear and uncontested powers—some used by an NRA card-carrying GOP president (Bush resigned from the group in 1995)—to deal with assault weapons.

Yet the White House remains stonily silent on Obama’s intentions even to reevaluate whether to exercise these powers. In the Big Easy, he made it sound as if gun control is always hard. It most definitely can be. But there are actions Obama can easily take, and what’s hard for Democrats and gun-control advocates to figure out is why he won’t.

***

[T]he vast majority of voters who dislike gun control have so many other reasons to oppose Obama that they are unlikely to switch just because he holsters this one issue. Congressional Democrats face the same dynamic. One reason Democrats abandoned gun control is because they concluded that it bled them rural- and blue-collar seats during the 1994 GOP landslide. But after slowly recapturing some of those seats, Democrats saw almost all of them wash away again in a 2010 GOP torrent swelled not by guns but the broader recoil from Obama’s activism.

If there is a road back to a Democratic congressional majority, it almost certainly will not run through such downscale districts; rather, it will go through the leafy suburban seats where gun control retains more backing. Likewise, if Obama survives in November, it will largely be because he maintained support among minorities and upscale women—not because he recaptured the blue-collar whites stampeding away from him.

Gun control is a high-risk issue because half of the electorate passionately opposes it. Yet it is the half that Democrats have little chance of reaching. Since Clinton’s era, almost all Republicans, even those from upscale places still open to restrictions, have bowed to the majority position on guns among their core supporters. However, on gun control, almost uniquely for a social issue, the president and most congressional Democrats have elevated the priorities of voters outside of their coalition over the preferences of those within it. In politics, as in combat, it isn’t much of a fight when one side unilaterally disarms.

***

The assault-weapons ban in place from 1994 to 2004, however, was not particularly successful. In prohibiting 19 brands of weapons (along with copycats), the law’s judgments seemed arbitrary. A gun that resembles a military rifle is not inherently more lethal than an aesthetically innocuous weapon. But the law’s prohibition of high-capacity magazines — capped at 10 rounds — strikes me as prudent. A 100-round, drum-style magazine — the kind that police say the Aurora suspect had in his AR-15 — is highly useful to someone intent on mass murder. It is less useful for an average citizen intent on self-defense, unless he fears home invasion by a foreign army.

Such laws are always a balance. In this case, the gain in public safety would be relatively small — restricting access to a destructive technology used by killers at Aurora, Tucson, Fort Hood and Virginia Tech. But the burden on gun rights would be minimal. Defenders of high-capacity magazines argue that they are more convenient at the gun range, since you can fill up a large magazine before leaving home. There is a constitutional difference between the argument “I need to defend myself from aggression” and “I’d prefer to reload less at the range.”

The temptation at times like these is to “do something” about guns. Australia and Britain passed tougher gun laws after mass shootings, and haven’t suffered another since. I would respectfully submit that Australia and Britain are full of Australians and Britons, not Americans. Moreover, neither country is home to an estimated 180 million privately owned guns, as ours is. Guns last forever. The one with which I hunt was made in 1900 and functions as well today as it did then. If tomorrow President Obama signed the ultimate gun-control law—a total ban on the sale, manufacture, and import of guns—we would still be awash in firearms for generations to come. Madmen like the murderer in Aurora would find a way to kill. Witness Timothy McVeigh…

The harm we’ve done by messing with law-abiding Americans’ guns is significant. In 2010, I drove 11,000 miles around the United States talking to gun guys (for a book, to be published in the spring, that grew out of an article I wrote for this magazine), and I met many working guys, including plumbers, parks workers, nurses—natural Democrats in any other age—who wouldn’t listen to anything the Democratic party has to say because of its institutional hostility to guns. I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return. Aside from what it does to the progressive agenda, needlessly vilifying guns—and by extension, their owners—adds to the rancor that has us so politically frozen and culturally inflamed. Enough.

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Well there aren’t enough superlatives to describe the structure of your argument. You have death a lethal blow to those in opposition.

Just keep in mind that the Pistol Shrimps are lifelong NRA members and on numerous occasions have defended the citizenry against armed thuggery by virtue of conceal and carry. They were practically born with a gun in their hand and are not afraid to use it.

I’m out, too. I can’t remember a more enjoyable evening here on QOTD (except for that whole JP/BMore thing). Thanks again, MadCon for wading in. Don’t think I don’t know what I was up against…..
Liam, I hope you get the help you so obviously need.

Loretta, I’ll let you know how to sign up for alerts from moveon.org tomorrow.

I’d argue that we’ve sacrificed generations of progress on health care, women’s and workers’ rights, and climate change by reflexively returning, at times like these, to an ill-informed call to ban firearms, and we haven’t gotten anything tangible in return.

“It may feel like just another day at the office, but occasionally life feels more like an action movie than reality,” says a narrator.

The City of Houston’s website offers these tips:

Run if a safe path is available. Always try and escape or evacuate even if others insist on staying.

Encourage others to leave with you but don’t let the indecision of others slow down your own effort to escape.

Once you are out of the line of fire, try to prevent others from walking into the danger zone and call 9-1-1.

If you can’t get out safely, find a place to hide.

When hiding, turn out lights, remember to lock doors and silence your ringer and vibration mode on your cell phone As a last resort, working together or alone, act with aggression, use improvised weapons and fight.

There is a constitutional difference between the argument “I need to defend myself from aggression” and “I’d prefer to reload less at the range.”

Let’s put that baby into another amendment’s context:

‘There is a constitutional difference between saying a sentence and writing a book.’

‘There is a constitutional difference between praying at your bedside and praying in church.’

‘There is a constitutional difference between you tweeting your friends about an accident you just saw and a major network reporting on it.’

What, pray-tell, is this lovely constitutional difference whereof he speaks? A high capacity magazine is in no way yelling ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater. A high capacity magazine is not like slander or libel. Blasphemy is protected speech, and those wanting to prohibit them are starting to make it sound like they are blasphemous to the nature of arms… and yet such is protected under the constitution.

Am I worried about an invading army?

*glances to the slackluster way our Nation’s borders are protected*

If you think that we don’t have enemies from abroad willing to kill us within our own borders, you’ve forgotten 9/11. And foreign gangs wielding actual weapons of war, RPGs, LAWs and improvising their own explosive based plasma weapons in the form of IEDs don’t seem to care about our gun laws. Beheaded corpses on our side of the border, IEDs found on our highways, criminal gangs employing weapons as did Pirates and brigands of old are all happening right now within our borders. They wage Private War and don’t recognize ANY sovereign authority over them to restrict them. These are not just a threat to the US but to all of mankind. I will not be so kind as to call them an ‘army’ but bands of war criminals waging war on their own? Yes.

That fits an ‘invasion’ from which our federal government is supposed to protect us.

It isn’t doing that.

My human rights allow me to utilize my positive liberty of warfare to determine what I need as self-protection for myself, my family, my property and to help my neighbors so that I can have a civil society. Wanting to disarm or in any way hinder me from doing that starts to put you on the other side of the ‘army’ question… the one that supports Private War by disarming civilians. Seeking to disarm or lower the capacity of what I see the threat as being is putting my human rights at risk as well as my life, my family’s lives, my property and the civil society I form with my neighbors.

If 9/11 didn’t convince you that there are problems with those making war outside of ‘armies’ and on their lonesome, and that individuals have the right to protect themselves from it… then what will convince you of this problem? We already have good demonstrations where it leads in many venues on this Earth and none of them are pleasant experiences. And so long as I utilize arms in a civil fashion, respect my neighbors and put none at risk from such arms, they make me no more of a risk than an unarmed person save to those wishing to terrorize me… I got a problem with those people, but then they aren’t one bit civil, now, are they?

When hiding, turn out lights, remember to lock doors and silence your ringer and vibration mode on your cell phone As a last resort, working together or alone, act with aggression, use improvised weapons and fight.

Improvised weapons?

What? A drinking straw and spitballs?

Flora Duh on July 28, 2012 at 7:19 AM

The “improvised weapons” part is not the problem. That’s good advice. The problem is what was left out. I believe it should have said something like, “use any available weapons (including improvised weapons) and fight.”

What part of “The Right of the PEOPLE, to keep and bear Arms shall NOT be infringed” does Allah not understand?
Nowhere in the 2nd Amendment is there language approving “reasonable” gun restrictions.
Also remember, that the 2nd does not give us this right; it simply states that a pre-existing Right may not be infringed!
As for high capacity magazines; I may not need one now, but when the time comes that I do need one, I would rather have it in my closet than be unable to purchase one because someone made a “reasonable” accommodation with MY Rights.
Remember also, that to boil a frog, you don’t put him in boiling water, you put him in warm water and slowly increase the heat until it boils.

The problem, of course, is in the definition of ‘reasonable’…Gun grabbers insist that they get to make that determination. The second issue, and the one that kills the idea dead for most gun owners, is the slippery slope argument. Lets be honest for a moment here. Has the left ever, ever drawn a line in the regulatory sand that they do not immediately move after they have achieved that gun control goal…We go from Saturday night specials to regulating guns whose only flaw is that they look scary to non gun owners.

Then we have the awkward problem with studies. Credible ones fail to demonstrate any positive effect from existing gun control laws on violent crime, suicide or accidents (National Academy of Sciences study) yet we have the left insisting on them. Gun free zones are nothing more than free fire zones. The idea is silly. If a gun control scheme does not work, why inflict it on a Constitutional Right.